One of my earliest memories of being on the Utah desert with my dad was crashing his Jeep into the side of a wash. It wasn't my fault! Really! I couldn't push the brake pedal all the way down because my legs weren't long enough.
My dad was one of five brothers who grew up in a high mountain coal mining camp. There was one sister, but she was killed working in an aircraft factory during WW II. An engine fell on her. His dad was the mine machinist. I imagine my granddad building the mine shaft elevator that the miners depended on to get them thousands of feet deep into the Utah mountains. I don't remember ever even touching my granddad. I only remember him snarling back and forth with his sons on the other side of a room. I think my granddad and his sons were actually close. It was just their way.
My dad was a construction carpenter and a tougher desert rat was never born. Tougher than a boiled owl. My dad liked to tell a story about how my granddad got him out of a sick bed to beat up another kid just to prove that he could do it. But my dad did have a limit.
One Saturday, he needed to get out into the desert and hunt rocks again. He only had one day to drive out to a place most people wouldn't be able to get to at all. So we were up in the cold dark and on the road. My dad had been swinging a hammer to beat ten penny nails into boards all week long and only had a few hours sleep. Once we got out onto a flat desert plain on a dirt road, and we hadn't seen another soul for over an hour, I guess he decided that I was old enough. He put me in the driver's seat and told me to just keep it in the middle of the road and less than forty miles an hour. He said if I met another car, I should just take my foot off the gas, slow down, and steer into the side of the road.
Things went fine for a while. My dad was sound asleep and driving the jeep wasn't hard at all. Until I saw a gash in the landscape ahead. A desert wash. This one didn't look too bad. I could see the road just dip down into it. I had seen my dad go through dozens and not even slow down.
But as the nose of the Jeep started into the wash, I suddenly realized that it didn't just climb the bank on the other side like I thought it would. The road turned a hard left and followed the wash bottom. In a panic, all I could think to do was to jam both feet on the pedals as hard as I could - which didn't begin to be hard enough. The Jeep went into the bank of the wash.
My dad woke up.
My dad usually didn't say too much. All I remember him saying that time was, "I'll drive now."
16 May 2022
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